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Weimar on the PacificGerman Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism$
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Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism

Ehrhard Bahr

Print publication date: 2007

Print ISBN-13: 9780520251281

Published to California Scholarship Online: March 2012

DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520251281.001.0001

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PRINTED FROM CALIFORNIA SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.california.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of California Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CALSO for personal use.date: 17 May 2022

Epic Theater versus Film Noir

Epic Theater versus Film Noir

Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang’s Anti-Nazi Film Hangmen Also Die

Chapter:
(p.129) chapter 5 Epic Theater versus Film Noir
Source:
Weimar on the Pacific
Author(s):

Ehrhard Bahr

Publisher:
University of California Press
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520251281.003.0006

When American newspapers reported the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942, Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang immediately seized upon the idea of writing a script for a hostage film. Only two months after the assassination, Brecht pasted into his diary a newspaper clipping of July 28 that announced the production of Never Surrender, a film with a Czechoslovakian locale. The film, to be produced by Arnold Pressburger and directed by Fritz Lang, would prominently feature the character of Heydrich the Hangmen. This chapter discusses Brecht's concept of “dialectic theater” and the principles of film noir as they were employed by Lang in his anti-Nazi film Hangmen Also Die. Brecht had developed the story together with Lang and believed that the film would be constructed in the manner of “epic theater,” but he did not realize that film noir, although dialectical in its story line and manipulation of reality, was based on suspense and surprise, which were anathema to dialectic theater.

Keywords:   Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, assassination, Reinhard Heydrich, epic theater, film noir, Never Surrender, Hangmen Also Die, dialectic theater, suspense

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